The Ruined Map by Kōbō Abe Page A

holding out to me, thinking a cigarette was after all less dangerous than an open flame. “If things are going to catch fire they do in the first second. Anyway, it’s all covered with insurance. The president himself would be just as happy to see it go.”
    The “president”? Ridiculous! Of course, with the outskirts of the city constantly expanding, in a single night town areas suddenly spring up from what had been fields. The large-scale development of presidents was nothing to be surprised at, particularly.
    “Someone like you is called ‘green.’ ”
    “Sure enough, compared to your nose, mine is pretty green.”
    “So have the last word.” With his fingers he blew his nose, which had become red either from the cold or from alcohol, whereupon a secretion that was neither tears nor eye gum oozed like honey from the corners of both eyes.
    He jumped over a ditch and moved to the side of the road where the tanks were lined up. In a strangely soft andsympathetic tone he said: “The old guy here had his pocket picked at the bike races—twenty thousand yen from the money he made selling off his land … then he forgot thirty thousand yen in the baggage rack on the streetcar … and he turned Red for good.”
    “Don’t talk nonsense,” snapped the older man, as he too turned in the direction of the tanks in the same sluggish way, with an expressionlessness that was neither denial nor affirmation. “Well … if we don’t put a little more muscle into it, the next load’ll be here before we know it.”
    “I’d just like to ask …” I too jumped the ditch, starting after him. As I went toward the two men, I shifted my briefcase to under my arm and turned the switch on the tape recorder. “How long has it been since you two began working here?”
    “It’s a little over a year for me,” said the younger one unconcernedly, setting to work. “Gramps, about three months maybe.”
    “It’s exactly three months and ten days today. And it’s not worth it.”
    “Then,” I said, turning the mike chiefly toward the younger man, “I guess you know the firm’s section head—Nemuro—head of sales. He must have showed up here a good many times.”
    “No, I haven’t heard of him.” Adroitly, he lifted the tank, which he had tipped to an angle, on to the board scarcely twelve inches wide that spanned the ditch beside the road. There he gave it a strong push, and taking advantage of the natural incline, steered it with his hands and his body as he rolled it along. “In any case, even when customers changed to Dainen from the old wholesaler we had nothing to do with it.”
    “When was that?” I said with unexpected emphasis, temporizing by pretending to be choked with cigarette smoke. Involuntarily my vocal cords tensed. “When was it that business shifted to here?”
    “Must have been last summer … we got a day off at the time of the change-over and went swimming in the river. A kid was drowned.”
    He answered casually, and did not particularly seem to be holding anything back.
    “July, was it? Or August?”
    “Probably July, I guess.”
    Supposing it were July, that would be about the time the husband, as the new section head, was doing all he could to get the M Fuel Supplier to change its affiliations. Or perhaps he had been promoted section head because he had been successful in these maneuvers. One way or the other, his efforts had borne fruit, and now the place was going ahead doing business with Dainen Enterprises. If the situation were the opposite and the maneuvers had ended in failure, with no contract being signed, that might have had something to do with his disappearance. However, that wasn’t the case. Again, I had wasted the battery of my tape recorder to no purpose.
    Somewhere in the distance a metallic explosion sounded, reverberating on either side of the hill in long drawn-out echoes. Perhaps it was the backfire of some heavy-duty motor. I flipped the knob on my tape